Read it.

Here’s something else that ISIS’s rise in Libya won’t improve: the prospects of the Democratic party’s heir apparent. Hillary Clinton’s claim to be a serious, credentialed candidate largely rests on her tenure as Secretary of State; at the top of her list of accomplishments in that office are the Libya campaign (which she lobbied a reluctant President Obama to undertake) and the reforms in Burma. Now Libya is very visibly sliding from bad to worse—and Burma doesn’t look good either.

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

So, white grown-ups are a minority in the San Francisco public schools, but their remaining presence is still looked upon as the most obvious explanation for the problems of black students. Even when whites are an actual minority, they remain the Legacy Majority. Sure, white employees of the San Francisco public schools probably voted for Obama 5 to 1 or 10 to 1, but they remain permanently tainted by their race.

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Gee, I wonder why?

The Clinton Foundation has dropped its self-imposed ban on collecting funds from foreign governments and is winning contributions at an accelerating rate, raising ethical questions as Hillary Clinton ramps up her expected bid for the presidency.

Somehow I don’t associate ‘ethics’ with Hillary Clinton.

The Other McCain ignores the Narrative.

The liberal media generally ignore sex scandals unless they involve a Republican politician or a Catholic priest, so maybe you didn’t hear about Mohammad Abdullah Saleem, the Illinois imam who allegedly perpetrated “decades of assault and child sex abuse . . . within the community of Indian and Pakistani Muslim immigrants.”

…

Tony Jones became a progressive religious celebrity, touring like a rock star on the “emergent” speaking circuit while his marriage was falling apart. If we are to believe the allegations of his ex-wife, Julie McMahon, Tony Jones developed a pornography habit and “starting in 2007, Mr. Jones began asking her repeatedly for sexual behaviors she found repellent, including anal sex.” Of course, this is the progressive gospel of “emergent” theology: “Thou shalt watch porn and do it in the butt.”

Freeberg connects the dots.

The consumers have been losing their voice. We have quite a few transactions being closed, only for the benefit of the supplier, many of them without the consent of the consumer or only with consent from the consumer that has been somehow perverted. It’s either been regulated when the will is not there, or given freely but without due consideration, more as a conditioned response.

While that’s happening, we have a decline in masculinity, almost as if there was some orbiting radioactive source breaking down our stores of testosterone. Our culture is not what it was before. Too many women have a need to scold men, and because consumers are tailoring their orders around the whims of suppliers and learning to like it that way, too many men are manufacturing a need to be scolded.

Read it.

There are no guarantees that smart people can’t do really really dumb things. (Consider how many of them voted for Obama….)

Jim Goad notices a disturbing trend.

There’s a fun new group for socially aware prepubescent girls of color in Oakland called the Radical Brownies. This fledgling organization is not affiliated with the Girl Scouts of America and was formed in December by a black woman and a Hispanic woman who describe themselves as “queer women of color and avid trans allies.”

Read it.

Really — what has he got to lose? She doesn’t dare divorce him; that would hurt her political career far beyond any negative effect it would have on him. Indeed, if he were ‘single again’, it would open the floodgates. Manhattan would sink from all the females heading to Noo Yawk to get a piece of the ol’ horndog hisself.

Read it.

And I, for one, am prepared to believe it.

Read it.

The Wall Street Journal mentions this morning that our now-socialized health care sector is filing panicked Supreme Court briefs in the upcoming King v. Burwell case that emphasize not legal arguments but the disruption to their business model if Obamacare’s state subsidies are struck down. In other words, they mostly submitted policy briefs to the Supreme Court—not legal briefs. I wonder if their lawyers gave them the appropriate policy wonk discount, since we work cheap compared to K Street lawyers. Somehow I doubt it.

Meanwhile, it is widely thought that in the first Obamacare case, NFIB v. Sebelius, the supporters of Obamacare “worked the refs”—specifically that a concentrated campaign to affect Chief Justice Roberts’s views worked to get him to change his mind by appealing to his jurisprudential minimalism, and to his concern for the political reputation of the Court. Who know if this actually contributed to Roberts changing his mind about the case and casting the deciding vote to uphold most of Obamacare, but that’s water under the bridge now.

Read it.

Well, that certainly accounts for some of the positions pushed by tReason magazine.

But ‘studies’ are behind Global Warming and the warnings against cholesterol, too, and we know how those worked out.

On the other hand, I’m prepared to believe this one, based on (granted, limited) anecdotal evidence.

Sarah Hoyt turns over a rock.

I’m doing this in my PJs, in a comfy heated office (filled with cardboard boxes) sitting at the black glass desk of Evil command. I’m drinking a beverage grown on another continent and transported by tech and human power across the world, so I can enjoy it.

I’m privileged. We are privileged beyond the dreams of kings and queens of past centuries.

Unfortunately when they tell you to “check your privilege” that’s not what they mean.

This is a phrase increasingly deployed by people (usually women – rolls eyes) with an academic background and its meaning is … liberal squid ink. If you’re telling them that Welfare was a disaster for black families (it was) and that affirmative action not only has been a disaster for many organizations, but corrodes the soul (you never know why you were hired. I have friends in that position) and institutes birth-privilege based on who your ancestors were (aka nobility) they will say “check your privilege.” This really doesn’t mean a heck of a lot. It can’t, because they have no idea who you are, or indeed if you have ever received any privilege growing up.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

I’ll bet he lies about being a Christian, too. Just sayin’.

Read it.

Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.

Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

You might be a blueneck.

The new ephemera-based economy thrills those who celebrate a brave new world led by intrepid tech oligarchs and Wall Street money-men. The oligarchs in these industries have gotten much, much richer during the current recovery, not only through stocks and IPOs, but also from ultra-inflated real estate in select regional areas, particularly New York City and coastal California. As economist George Stiglitz has noted, such inflation on land costs has been as pervasive an effect of Fed policy as anything else.

Even in Houston, some academics hail the impending “collapse of the oil industrial economy,” even as they urge city leaders to compete with places like San Francisco for the much ballyhooed “creative class.” Yet University of Houston economist Bill Gilmer notes that low energy prices are driving tens of billions of new investment at the port and on the industrial east side of the city. This growth, he suggests, may help offset some of the inevitable losses in the more white collar side of the energy complex.

The emergence of a new ephemera-led economy bodes very poorly for most Americans, and not just Texans or residents of North Dakota. The deindustrialized ephemera-dominated economy of Brooklyn, for example, has made some rich, but overall incomes have dropped over the last decade; roughly one in four Brooklynites, overwhelmingly black and Hispanic, lives in poverty. Similar patterns of increased racial segregation and middle class flight can be found in other post-industrial cities, including one-time powerhouse Chicago, where areas of  concentrated poverty have expanded in recent years.

Nowhere is this clearer than in ephemera central: California. Once a manufacturing juggernaut and a beacon of middle class opportunity, the Golden States now suffers the worst level of poverty in the country. While Silicon Valley and its urban annex, San Francisco, have flourished, most of the state—from Los Angeles to the Inland regions—have done poorly, with unemployment rates 25 percent or higher than the national average. The ultra-“progressive” city now suffers the most accelerated increase in inequality in the country.

Read it.

The signal flaw of this thumbsucker is stated in the subhead:

The children of the rich and powerful are increasingly well suited to earning wealth and power themselves. That’s a problem.

Why? It’s never explained, just assumed.

For sure, America has always had rich and powerful families, from the floor of the Senate to the boardrooms of the steel industry. But it has also held more fervently than any other country the belief that all comers can penetrate that elite as long as they have talent, perseverance and gumption.

Unfotunately, there is increasing evidence that ‘talent, perseverence, and gumption’ are in large part hereditary and fostered by a good family life. This gives ‘progressives’ hives, because their whole worldview is founded on the nonsensical notion that every person is just the same as every other person, so any difference in outcome must be due to some evil circumstance, probably caused by some Rich White Person.

Today’s elite is a long way from the rotten lot of West Egg. Compared to those of days past it is by and large more talented, better schooled, harder working (and more fabulously remunerated) and more diligent in its parental duties. It is not a place where one easily gets by on birth or connections alone. At the same time it is widely seen as increasingly hard to get into.

That’s because talent is hereditary and not available to everybody without exception, schooling and hard work depend on individual effort that goes against the grain of the natural indolence of human nature, and diligence in parental duties is a product of a culture that most ‘underprivileged’ refuse to adopt.

More than 50 years ago Michael Young warned that the incipient meritocracy to which he had given a name could be as narrow and pernicious, in its way, as aristocracies of old.

Which is, of course, only a problem if you are predisposed to assume that all inequality is somehow bad.

Once progressives saw academic testing as a way of breaking down old structures of privilege; there is now a growing sense that it simply serves to advantage those who have been schooled to excel in such situations.

In other words, the system works, and they don’t like it, because it points out that their core assumptions are bullshit; they react as they always have, by blaming the facts for showing up their premises rather than re-evaluate their premises in light of the facts.

Read it.

But there is a second way by which technology can suppress wages – when technology can guide and track workers the output of different workers becomes more uniform and thus more fungible. Before the era of ubiquitous cheap information technology, training and tracking the performance of mid and low skill workers was more expensive. Workers varied significantly in quality and ability and it made sense to pay workers with experience more so they would not have to be replaced by new workers who would be expensive to train. The extreme example of the fungible worker is the Amazon warehouse worker.

…

Before these technological advancements, workers enjoyed mini-monopolies. The warehouse worker couldn’t be easily replaced because their replacement might be way less efficient as they learned the layout of their workplace. As technology more directly guides low and mid skill workers in their jobs the workers are losing their mini-monopolies. Workers don’t need job specific experience to be hired so the supply of workers available to every technology guided job has increased. A higher supply leads to a lower price (the price of a worker is their wage). After full employment is reached the general wage level may increase for low skilled workers, but for now the impact of the Great Factor Price Equalization and the More Fungible Worker are suppressing the wages of middle and lower class developed world workers.

Yet another nail in the coffin of the Minimum Wage: If the choice is between hiring the Fungible Worker in a country that mandates a minimum wage and the Fungible Worker in a country that doesn’t, who get the job? Hint: It isn’t one of Barack Obama’s bought votes.

Theodore Dalrymple turns over a rock.

One little phrase in Le Monde’s report of an incident in Nice—in which a man aged 30 called Moussa Coulibaly attacked with a knife three soldiers guarding a Jewish community center—caught my attention: rien de bien méchant, nothing very bad.

It was used in describing his prior record: Coulibaly had been found guilty six times between 2003 and 2012 by French courts of “theft, use of drugs, insulting policemen,” and had received either fines or suspended prison sentences for his rien de bien méchant. Given the percentage of offenses that are actually elucidated in France (as elsewhere), the chances are that he had committed at least ten times as much as he had ever been charged with, and it is also very likely that some of what he had done was a good deal more serious than anything that has come to light. At the very least delinquency was his way of life; and the total amount of harm he did, the misery caused to or inflicted on others, considerable. Rien de bien méchant doesn’t quite capture it, and could only have been written by someone inhabiting so utterly different a social world that he has no idea of the nature of Coulibaly’s.

The Other McCain carefully refrains from saying I Told You So.

Notice that this is O’Donnell’s second lesbian wife. Her first marriage to longtime girlfriend Kelli Carpenter ended in 2007. Carpenter now has her own second wife, and the four O’Donnell-Carpenter children seem closer to Kelli than to Rosie. Nobody in the world of media is allowed to say a word about the unnatural weirdness of all this — two boys and three girls without fathers, one of them (Kelli’s youngest) conceived by artificial insemination — because equality!

Read it.

I have a little list….

Read it.

Worse than Hillary? Whoa, that’s cold.

But just think of what a great President he would have been!

Read it.

This line is the first of its kind, making Kingsman the first film where you can buy every outfit you see in the movie. In fact, this project has been in works since day one of the film’s production. In a recent promo video, the film’s costume designer talks about how they designed the actors’ clothes with the intention of being able to market them later (the film’s original title, The Secret Service, was even changed to Kingsman: The Secret Service after the second was deemed more marketable as a clothing label).

…

Now, we have Kingsman, where you can buy exactly what the actors are wearing, and the film’s producers get a cut.

Read it.

The story begins, as ever, with a small group of social justice-minded community elites who sought to establish themselves as the arbiters of social mores. This group would decide who deserved a presence in SFF and who deserved to be ostracised.

Their victims are littered across the SFF community. In 2013, the Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) were targeted by a shirtstorm-like cyber-mob of digital puritans after one of their cover editions was deemed to be “too sexual.” The controversy did not die down until two of its most respected writers, Mike Resnick and Barry Malzburg, were dismissed from the publication. This occurred despite a vigorous counter-campaign by liberal members of the sci-fi community, including twelve Nebula award winners and three former presidents of the SFWA. 

Unfortunately, the current crop of elite figures in the SFF community have become either apologists or out-and-out cheerleaders for intolerance and censorship. Redshirts author John Scalzi, a close friend of  anti-anonymity crusader Wil Wheaton – was head of the SFWA at the time of the controversy and quickly caved in to activist pressure. This was unsurprising, given that he shared many of their identitarian views.

But Scalzi is, if anything, merely the moderate ally of a far more radical group of community elites. He hasn’t gone nearly as far as former SFWA Vice President Mary Kowal, who handles political disagreement by telling her opponents to “shut the fuck up” and quit the SFWA. Or former Hugo nominee Nora Jemisin, who says that political tolerance “disturbs” her. Or, indeed, the prolific fantasy author Jim C. Hines, who believes that people who satirize religion and political ideologies (a very particular religion, and a very particular ideology, of course) should be thrown out of mainstream SFF magazines.

Read it.

A few decades ago, if you saw a lovely spaceship on a book cover, with a gorgeous planet in the background, you could be pretty sure you were going to get a rousing space adventure featuring starships and distant, amazing worlds. If you saw a barbarian swinging an axe? You were going to get a rousing fantasy epic with broad-chested heroes who slay monsters, and run off with beautiful women. Battle-armored interstellar jump troops shooting up alien invaders? Yup. A gritty military SF war story, where the humans defeat the odds and save the Earth. And so on, and so forth.

These days, you can’t be sure.

The book has a spaceship on the cover, but is it really going to be a story about space exploration and pioneering derring-do? Or is the story merely about racial prejudice and exploitation, with interplanetary or interstellar trappings?

There’s a sword-swinger on the cover, but is it really about knights battling dragons? Or are the dragons suddenly the good guys, and the sword-swingers are the oppressive colonizers of Dragon Land?

A planet, framed by a galactic backdrop. Could it be an actual bona fide space opera? Heroes and princesses and laser blasters? No, wait. It’s about sexism and the oppression of women.

Finally, a book with a painting of a person wearing a mechanized suit of armor! Holding a rifle! War story ahoy! Nope, wait. It’s actually about gay and transgender issues.

Or it could be about the evils of capitalism and the despotism of the wealthy.

Do you see what I am trying to say here?

Apparently ‘progressives’ are taking over the Science Fiction and Fantasy genre and turning it into another Voice of the Crust.

Fortunately, we have our Baen to keep us warm.

Read it.

The effect on my potential ingestion of salami? Not so delightful.

Read it.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has also weighed in, urging 8:30 a.m. or later for high schoolers. Ignoring the evidence on school start times is the equivalent of ignoring the evidence on the harmful effects of lead paint exposure, asbestos or second-hand tobacco smoke.

I’ve been pushing this for years. Not that anybody listens. ‘You don’t have any kids so we don’t even see you.’

Read it.

President Obama’s new budget plan doesn’t just propose spending a historic amount of money over the coming decade. It also seeks to jack up the amount of tax revenue, all in the name of Mom, apple pie, and the great American middle class.

Read it.

President Obama released his FY 2016 budget yesterday. It contains dozens of tax increases that go on for page after page. Buried in there is a series of tax increases on U.S. employers who also do business abroad. Because the U.S. has a “worldwide” tax regime, any further U.S. taxation of overseas income represents a double tax on that income. By definition, these overseas profits have already faced taxation in the country where they were earned. The United States should instead move to a “territorial” tax system, where the IRS only taxes profits earned inside our borders. That’s what the rest of the developed world does, and it’s time to modernize the code to reflect current best practices.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all: Groundhogs are rodents -> rodents have teeth.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

The Sino-American relationship may be in decent shape. It’s other countries we should be worried about.

Read it.

President Barack Obama’s latest budget is his most populist ever, seeking big tax hikes to pay for ambitious new spending on education and infrastructure in a dare to Republicans to find common ground.

The ‘Vote For Us And Get Free Stuff’ Democrat program has to be paid for somehow.

The Atlantic, Voice of the Crust, finds the Next Crisis.

More people with low incomes now live outside of cities, and some areas are ill-equipped to deal with the influx of the poor.

Sky is falling. Film at 11. Women and minorities hardest hit.

Read it.

I refuse to eat anything that looks like dog barf. Sorry.

Read it.

This is NPR, so you have to take all this with a grain of salt. Still, he seems to be asking the right questions.

It’s hard to understand why you get 36 different first-class envelopes with 36 different pieces of paper from the same insurance company on the same day. That tells you something about the efficiency of the health care industry right there. But then, as you open each envelope, they’re as completely unintelligible to me as they are to you, as they are to everyone listening. But better yet, they’re also as unintelligible, apparently, to the people who write them.

I got to do what is probably a reporter’s dream … which is I took one of those explanations of benefits, which said, “Amount billed: zero. Amount insurance company paid: zero.” And the third column said, “Amount you owe: $154.” So it makes no sense.

I’ve had the same experience.

But here’s what I got to do: I had scheduled, as part of the reporting for my book, an interview with the CEO of United Healthcare, the largest health insurance company in the United States — and my health insurance company, as it turns out. I went out to Minnesota to interview him and asked him all kinds of questions about what he thought the impact of the Obama health reform was likely to be. And at the end, I took that explanation of benefits out of my suit pocket and said, “I’m wondering if you could do me a favor, could you explain this to me?” … “How can I owe $154 if nothing was billed?” He looks at it … and looks up at me and says, “I could sit here all day and I couldn’t explain that to you. I have no idea why they sent this to you.”

And that tells you everything that there is to know about American health insurance — although not even close to being what you want to know and perhaps need to know.

The insurance companies are not really the bad actors in this movie. The insurance companies are in many ways like us: They pay health care bills. The culprit here — and the reason that the Affordable Care Act doesn’t work is, is not going to work — is that nothing has been done to curb the marketplace of exorbitant bills and exorbitant profiteering on the part of hospitals, medical device makers and obviously the drug companies. The insurance companies are as much the victim of that as we are. Now, they’re terribly managed; again, the CEO of the largest company can’t even explain what his bill means. They’re incompetently managed; they’re not very nice people when you get them on the phone. But they’re sort of stuck in the same ditch we’re in, which is being forced — unlike the payers for health care in any other developed country on the planet — being forced to pay uncontrolled, exorbitant prices and high profits that are generated by nonprofit hospitals and by drug companies and medical device makers. In that sense, I kind of feel sorry for them.

As do I — your tax dollars at work.

In the sense that if you step back the way I did as a reporter and look at the economics of health care in the United States, it’s absurd. That nonprofit hospital makes a lot of profit. The executives are highly compensated. The people who sell all of the equipment that is in operating room have humongous profit margins. The [prescription] drugs that I was given … have humongous profit margins and we have done nothing in this country, unlike every other country in the free world, to control that because we have lived with the illusion that health care can be a free market.

Note the pervasive ‘progressive’ delusion that ‘free market’ means ‘small profit’. In fact, the whole hostility to profit — the larger the profit, the more the hostility — is one of the signature obsessions of the modern Left. The high profit margins for health care is quite simply explained by the fact that there is not, and never has been, a ‘free market’ in health care (or health insurance); it’s one of those ‘basic rights’ (like roads and schools) that people insist government subsidize and the costs of which are therefore grossly inflated.

Read it.

Jonathan Ray of the National Interest examines the question of how China builds weapons that it declares are immoral. “Why does China develop weapons systems that it opposes? China criticizes U.S. ballistic missile defense (BMD) systems, but conducted three BMD tests of its own from 2010 to 2014. China regularly supports a treaty to ban space weapons, but has repeatedly tested an anti-satellite (ASAT) system.”

Uh, they’re Communists, and Communists lie like a Clinton? Just a guess, you understand.

Why? Because the Chinese have realized that given a choice between what is real and what is depicted on paper, Western leaders always believe the paper.  Incredulously, unbelieving at first but with growing confidence they realized they can treat Western leaders with the same contempt that European traders once showed to primitive tribesmen in the Amazon or Congo rain forests.

And equally profitably.

Read it.

The Nine Trey Gangsters (also referred to as Nine Trey Gangstas) are a set of the United Blood Nation street gang, the latter of which is a set of the Bloods street gang. The gang was established in 1993 at the Rikers Island jail complex in New York City, and operates on the East Coast of the United States. The gang has operated in the U.S. state of Virginia and other states. It has been alleged to engage in the sex trafficking of women and racketeering in Virginia, New York, North Carolina, Maryland and other areas. The gang has also been alleged to be involved in the distribution of illegal drugs, including heroin, cocaine, crack, ecstasy, marijuana and prescription painkillers in these areas. Further allegations include those of dealing in counterfeit U.S. currency and using counterfeit currency to “finance wholesale drug purchases”.

Hey, ‘Black Lives Matter’.

The Other McCain boils it down.

Feminism is the belief that men are entirely useless, except when men are destructive and evil. If you think any man ever had any skill, knowledge or virtue that entitled him to be treated with courtesy and respect, you are not a feminist.

Darwin award.

Attempts to click “eye-catching pictures” to upload them on social networking sites cost three college going friends from New Delhi, Moradabad and Faridabad their lives on Monday when they were run over by the speeding train.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Yesterday’s political agreement in Sweden would have been labeled a “coup” had it occurred in some Third-World backwater. The seven mainstream political parties got together and agreed to ignore the wishes of their respective voters, and will act in unison from now until 2022. This wholesale abandonment of democracy was undertaken in order to maintain (or increase) the current unsustainable rate of mass immigration into Sweden, and to keep the Sweden Democrats from increasing their presence in parliament.

The agreement guarantees that Swedish voters will not get a chance to repudiate the new junta until the next general election in 2018. However, given the current rate of political self-destruction in Sweden, there may no longer be a functioning polity in four years in which meaningful elections can be held.

Read it.

Columbia never used to shut down at all, New York City never used to shut down the transit system, and the states never used to shut down all roadways. Until the past decade or so people tried to go about their business here in the winter, taking action to shut things down only once snow had arrived and was causing a problem. The US has now become a nation of hysterics, with media-driven hype frightening everyone about everything, and public officials desperately taking action to protect the citizenry from imaginary threats.

Walter Russell Mead looks at Putin from a Davos perspective.

The trouble is that the contemporary Western mind has a hard time grasping a basic truth about both Putin and ourselves; we are not the world, and Putin is not us. There are three subjects on which virtually everybody in the Western policy and intellectual establishments agree: think of them as the core values of the Davoisie: The first is that the rise of a liberal capitalist and more or less democratic and law-based international order is both inevitable and irreversible. The second is that the Davos elite—the financiers, politicians, intellectuals, haute journalists and technocrats who mange the great enterprises, institutions and polities of the contemporary world—know what they are doing and are competent to manage the system they represent. The third is that no serious alternative perspective to the Davos perspective really exists; our establishment believes in its gut that even those who contend with the Davos world order know in their hearts that Davos has and always will have both might and right on its side.

But Putin lives and thinks outside of the Davos box. By Davos standards, Putin is a heretic and a renegade. He thinks the whole post-historical Western consensus is a mix of flapdoodle and folderol. It is, from his perspective, a cocktail of ignorance, arrogance, vanity and hypocrisy, and he wants no part of it.

Putin isn’t exactly right about the Davos consensus; there is more inertia and power behind the global status quo than he understands. But because he is outside the Davos bubble, he sees things that the Davoisie can’t, and it is those insights, some more valuable than others, that enable him to astound and wrong-foot his opponents time after time.

Read it.

Not that it matters a damn. They still vote for people who wouldn’t give them school choice if you twisted their tongues and kneed them in the groin.

Read it.

The end of the Cold War didn’t necessarily mean the end of war between big countries, and Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine undermines the notion that a quiet Europe is forever free from war.

Europeans have no illusions about each other.

Tyler Cowen noticies these things so you don’t have to.

When I visited Santa Monica in January it struck me how much it reminded me of…Arlington.  Arlington is now essentially a part of Northwest, at least Arlington above Route 50 or so.  Arlington and Santa Monica have never been more alike, or less distinctive.

Read it.

Without mothers, the world would not be the place that it is. And yet, in our self-hating society, motherhood is denigrated, despised, and belittled. Mothers are mocked for becoming mothers, and then challenged to perform beyond human limits. When they fail? Mocked again. It’s enough to make you wonder why they bother.

Let’s put this into perspective. Only a very small portion of the world’s societies demand that a woman keep maintaining a career while trying to raise her children. As a result, neither the children nor the career get full justice. But in our society, should the mother choose her children over her career, then she is ‘giving in to the patriarchy’ and this is a shameful thing in the eyes of those who ought to be supporting her.

I am not saying that motherhood means mewing yourself up in the house with the children, your husband the only source of adult human contact… that would drive most people mad. I remember those days, and how helpful the internet was. I also was helping start up, then running full time, a successful small business from the time my first child was still in diapers. The phone and the internet made it possible for me, and had I been able to drive, I could have done even more.

The whole modern feminist shtick is that women have to work in an office for someone else in order to be Real People. Being an entrepreneur is apparently out of the question … as is being an author or a consultant or a programmer or anything else that can be done from the living room while listening to the baby monitor.

The Other McCain allows us a peek behind the curtain.

Emily McCombs is a recovering addict with tattoos and a pierced nose, not to mention a history of bulimia and sexual perversion, so it only makes sense that she is executive editor of the feminist blog XOJane.com. Feminism is a movement of “broken people” who blame “society” for their misfortunes and thus feel compelled to avenge themselves by destroying civilization as we know it.

Steve Sailer is on the case.

Following up Masha Gessen’s article in The New Yorker, here’s an NYT column on the apparently burning issue of just how big a threat white racists are to poor Dzhokhar Tsarnaev over his not looking white enough.

Sure, he’s white, but not white-white.

Of course, unprivileged discriminated against nonwhites like Professor Nour Kteily of the Kellogg School of Management should not be subjected to such indignities. It’s hard enough for upper middle class Lebanese to get by in the racist hellhole of America when they come here from Canada to share with us ignorant Americans their world-famous Lebanese wisdom on how different ethnic groups can all get along. (E.g., Should your ethnic group shell your neighbors’ apartment buildings with heavy artillery or just stick with sniper fire? Perhaps mortars make an ideal compromise?)

Yeah, I can see that as a problem.

Read it.

Wow, BHO’s tax ideas sure are stinky. If only there was an alternative political party to speak of.

If only….

Read it.

The only problem I have with it is the column ‘Reporter Ratings’, as if ‘journalists’ are some sort of paragons of virtue.